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Nano-Proprietary (now, apparently APNT), previously blamed for the delays in rolling out SED televisions, has lost what seems to be an important appeal.

The US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit has found that the “irrevocable, perpetual” licence agreement APNT had granted to Canon could not be terminated by APNT “notwithstanding a material breach of the agreement”. APNT dropped 17% from USD 1.09 on the Friday (25th July 2008) the decision was filed to USD 0.90 on the following Monday.

The court also confirmed that, by virtue of the licence agreement between APNT and Canon, Canon can now grant to its wholly owned subsidiary, SED Inc., a valid sublicence use the relevant APNT patents. Subsequent to APNT's initial claim SED Inc. was restructured from what was effectively a 50/50 joint venture between Canon and Toshiba into a 100% Canon subsidiary.

This is the first appeal. We're not familiar with the US appeals system, but judgment was only filed on 25th July 2008 (which we think makes it likely that it has not yet been decided whether there is any right to a further appeal). There’s a press statement from APNT dated 28th July which states that their counsel is currently “considering options”.

SED - hello glorious 55" screen with 1ms and 50,000:1 contrast - might yet appear!

[First seen at the Arstechnica forums in a post by Biggiesized]

Futuremark very kindly let us know that they're currently running a comic strip competition, in conjunction with Alienware.

The prize is a pretty sweet notebook - with a 17" screen and powered by an Intel Core 2 processor (specific processor is not stated) together with an AMD Mobility Radeon X1800. Intel and AMD are working together! (*I keeeeeddd.*) I would love to have one to play WoW on. :D

Anyhow, the contest itself is pretty fun - you basically draw a mini comic strip (on anything) and if it's judged to be the "best/funniest" - then you win! [Strangely - only one entry per person, and not so strangely - you must be in the US/Canada/EU.] Unfortunately, like most contests of this sort, all rights in the contest entries accrue to Futuremark - and a little more unusually, even moral rights (e.g. the right to be identified as the author of the comic) are possibly assigned to Futuremark.

I don't quite know if I agree with this. While the practice is certainly widespread (check it out the terms and conditions the next time you enter any contest which involves you creating copyrightable work), and indeed might make the entire exercise commercially feasible (e.g. free sources of photos!), perhaps taking such a harsh approach isn't the best way. Taken to an extreme, the transfer of your rights means that you can't even display the comic you drew for the contest, because you no longer own the copyright. It's possible to argue that the copyrights were procured for a fee, and indeed if the person was actually compensated (i.e. was a contest winner) perhaps this would be true, but in this case ALL copyrights are assigned once the entry is submitted. Oh well. Just so long as the people drawing the comics are aware of this ;)

The other thing, which is not really as unusual, is that you provide personal information and "opt-in" to receive marketing. My friend, Wil Harris, wrote a little while back that Web 2.0 = loss of privacy. It's probably true, and the question is how much that really is worth. Having to reveal your information in a competition is probably less insidious - and Futuremark at least has a decent privacy policy. Just something else to take note of, generally...

[and I didn't post the previous story!~ must have left some setting changed accidentally. I'll leave it on though, just for fun..]

Thomas Oldervoll from Zenior AS has developed GCalsync, a java program which synchronizes phones. Currently at version 1.04, it supports basic sync functionality, although there are still a couple of rough edges, and not all java capable phones are totally supported.

Possibly worth a look though, if you use Google Calendar. We prefer outlook + Nokia PC Sync. :)

[via mobitopia]

This initiative will attract a critical mass of open source software developers to build a consistent, web browser engine as the clearest path to minimize fragmentation in the mobile browser market. With nearly 100 million smartphones deployed worldwide, a common open source solution driving mobile web browser consistency will deliver on the long-awaited promise of full-web browsing and a true web experience for smartphone users around the globe. - Lee Epting, vice president Forum Nokia

Hopefully that happens. We think that it might, not because of the open source initiative, but because the browsers based on the S60webkit (see review here) might be the best (mobile) browsers on the market now and for the forseeable future. Opera Mobile took the early lead, but that was because Nokia's offering of the time was pretty abysmal.

The biggest threat is probably still Opera - with the release of Opera Mini 2.0, which is compatible with almost all java-enabled phones, it seems that fragmentation might be about to come to an end. If, however, S60webkit is ported to java... (although from a technical perspective that seems unlikely; part of the reason Opera Mini works is that it is partially predicated upon thin-client mentality.)

This is the beginning of the mobile browser wars; only now is most of the world beginning to get access to the 3G (and other) wireless broadband technologies which will eventually allow an acceptable (roughly comparable to the desktop) user experience.

We've been silent for awhile, and so lots of yummilicious gadget news has gone un-posted about. These following three bits would probably never have been posted anyhow, but they're so ineffebly cool that we couldn't resist (today).

1. Furry Flash drive series from Imation - stuffed animals which store information.

2. RFID-Blocking wallet - which makes those RFID credit cards normal again (and possibly safe): technology to prevent technology.

3. Topless sandals: no straps, because most topless things are nice (except topless sundaes, urgh.)

[via: Gizmodo, Gizmodo, and Gizmodo]

We really liked Quartz by Elements Interactive when we reviewed it - we rated it "Highly Recommended."

While that's not available for free, Elements Interactive has just released a free holiday follow-up, Quartz X-mas, available here. This is becoming a bit of a tradition - last year they released a holiday themed Li-Nuggz. (Still available.)

If you don't want those (or have them already!) - Nokia also has released it's traditional Christmas game. Pity about the adverts.

Pretty good stuff. A mobile friendly version of the popular Google gmail service has launched, with the following features:

• Quick links that identify addresses and package tracking numbers in emails and displays them to the right of users' Inbox so they can more easily access maps, directions, or tracking information with a single click.
• Gmail Web Clips, which appear at the top of the Gmail inbox and enable users to read Google News, a friend's blog, or any RSS or Atom feed from their Gmail account.
• Anti-virus protection that automatically scans messages with attachments.
• The ability to view attachments in HTML instead of downloading to the desktop or mobile phone.
• A vacation auto-responder, which enables users to automatically notify people when they're away from email or unable to respond.
• The option to create contact groups (one of the most highly-requested Gmail features)

Check it out now at: http://m.gmail.com. The address works even on a normal computer, and if you have a g-mail account you can sign right in. (Look here if you haven't got one yet - 2674MB free!)

[via ]

So - del.icio.us has been bought by Yahoo, (yahoo blog / del.icio.us blog), and everyone has an opinion on tagging.

We'll just reference Stephen Green (who is nice and concise) - Let's say we have a system where people manually assign keywords to documents (tagging) and let's also say that people can run queries against this index of keywords. You can think of such a query as an attempt by the searcher to assign keywords to a document that he or she would like to get in response to the query. The problem is that the person who originally assigned a tag to the document and the searcher who "assigned a tag" to the document are going to be inconsistent, so the searcher won't pick quite the same tag.

This is true. However, it also misses the point. No one ever said that tagging was the answer for search engines (it's clearly not), or that it was superior to keyword searching within documents. However - pictures (what flickr uses tags for) are not documents, and neither are links (what del.icio.us uses tags for).

When considering links and pictures, tagging, and being able to search those tags, is alot more useful than having no tagging. Links and pictures include some metadata, but usually not nearly enough to find a particular one in a pile.

Even if people are internally inconsistent, having the ability to search for a particular photo by inputting something (dimly remembered text) is better than being forced to search by scrolling by date. That's why we think all photo albums should support tags.

Indeed, we think that in the future, certain tags should be added automatically. For pictures, having EXIF data include things like geographical location (by GPS or from cell networks) would be nice.

[Image Credit: Om Malik]